[Sigia-l] Human-Centered Design 99% bad

[Ted Han]

On 7/28/05, Boniface Lau <boniface_lau at compuserve.com> wrote:
> 
> > From: Alexander Johannesen
> >
> > I actually got a bit angry while reading it. The introduction reads:
> > "If it is so critical to understand the particular users of a product,
> > then what happens when a product is designed to be used by almost
> > everyone in the world?"
> >
> [...]
> > what the hell is the *difference* between designing for some users
> > compared to all users?
> 
> The difference lies in the word "particular". Is it that critical to
> understand the "particular" users of a product? If so, what happens
> when designing for the mass?
> 
> When a design is based on the understanding of activities, the
> specifics of individual users are no longer that important.

That's just as silly a criticism as the ones i remarked on previously though...

Given the proper precautions you should be able to (in fact one must)
move from an analysis of particular users to a generalize set of
users.  Failures to use inductive methods properly is not a failure of
HCD, it's a failure to understand statistics.

-T